Tom's 3D Printer Guide

This blog is intended to serve as a simple, straight-forward guide for building and using your own 3D printer. I created and continually update this blog for a simple reason: the current state of 3D printing is confusing and I feel that this discourages new enthusiasts. Hopefully the simplicity of this blog will encourage more people to take the plunge into the world of reprap and 3D printing.

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Saturday, February 1, 2014

One of my big gripes with 3D printing is that the technology is not obviously beneficial to Joe Sixpack (regardless of what the media portrays). There is obviously huge value in 3D printing for engineers, designers, and hobbyists but what is the average person supposed to do with it? Basically if you aren't proficient in CAD, 3D printing is nearly useless. Sure there are design repositories like GrabCAD and ContentCentral. But anyone can submit files, there is little to no moderation and every file that I have downloaded from these sources has failed miserably. I now no longer use these resources since they are so frustrating. What the average person needs is an .stl repository with images of successful prints and a data-table that links the .stls to viable printers.

To that end I am organizing all of my household designs in this location. They have all successfully printed on mono-filament repraps. There are .stl download links hosted on shapeways in each of the individual pages.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Let's get down to business. First you get the PSA, then you get the story and the why.

Lasers can be outright dangerous (especially incident light). If you are going to use a laser be sure to take appropriate safety precautions. This means protect your eyes (and prevent fires)...

Note: this PSA applies to any laser with a power output greater than 5 mW.

To do this first figure out the wavelength of the laser. It should be listed on the laser's spec sheet. Based on the laser's wavelength purchase a pair of safety glasses (these cover multiple wavelengths, but do your own research). Anytime that the laser is on wear the glasses. Simple. Another option is to keep the laser system in a completely opaque enclosure, but this will obviously prevent viewing of the assembly during use. To prevent fire, simple keep the laser from dumping too much power into a single spot for too long a time.

Now it is story time. A perfect storm of events has prompted this PSA including but not limited to:

"Playing" with outright dangerous lasers in the development of my own 3D printer design

Musing about my personal design philosophy

Realizing and articulating that SAFETY is my absolute number one design priority (for myself, my colleagues, my potential customers, and the public at large)

Reading about the apparent flood of low cost laser machines on the market

As you may have noticed, there seems to be a new Reprap style laser machine hitting the web everyday. There is a successful Kickstarter for the 100 mW MicroSlice, there is the 1 W LaserV on OpenBuilds, and there is even a 1.7 W hombrew 3D printer/laser combo on r/reprap. All of these designs have two highly disturbing features in common: high power lasers and open air frames.

Let's take a look at the actual danger associated with lasers and incident light.There is an excellent Wikipedia page on laser safety. I highly recommend reading this page as a primer. About 1/3 of the way down the page there is a highly telling chart that I have conveniently pasted below. The graph displays maximum permissible exposure in Watts per unit area vs exposure time for various wavelengths. What this means is that if your eyes are exposed to the power levels shown for the indicated time, you will get permanent eye damage.

Let's run through a real life example. We ca use the absorption curve for Ethidium-bromide-ABS to drive the example. Below 300 nm (ultraviolet) this material absorbs most laser radiation, converting it to heat energy. However in the visible spectrum, the laser reflects most of the laser radiation. If we were to shine a 1.7 W blue laser (355 nm) at this material most of the energy would be reflected. If a portion the size of your iris landed on your iris, you would have permanent eye damage in less than a second.

The moral of the story is please, please, please be safe when using lasers. Always wear appropriately rated safety glasses or ensure that your laser is fully enclosed (I prefer both).

Saturday, January 18, 2014

If you have spent any appreciable amount of time reading this blog, you probably know that I have an unhealthy obsession with not only 3D printing and design but also command strips (seen here and here).

One day while discussing some of my designs with a co-worker we got on the topic of command strips (we truly are boring people I guess) and he made a comment that has stuck with me since. Many of you probably know the old adage that anything can be fixed with WD-40 and Duct tape. Well my co-worker believes that the future will be owned by rapid prototype parts and command strips. Since my present is owned by these, I fully support his theory.

Thus Ben's Axiom to the Handyman Postulate has been born.

Just to be clear...

the Handyman Postulate: Anything can be fixed with WD-40 and Duct tape.

Ben's Axiom: The future will be held together with RP parts and command strips.